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Stephanie Moore
Chief Counsel, Dems-Subcom. on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet at U.S. House of Representatives
Washington D.C. Metro Area Legislative Office
Current
Chief Counsel, Democrats-Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet at U.S. House of Representatives
Past
Senior Counsel, House Judiciary Committee at U.S. House of Representatives
General Counsel at House Committee on Education and Labor
Counsel to Congressman Mel Watt (N.C.-12) at House Judiciary Committee
Education
Oberlin College
Connections
Public Profile
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/stephanie-moore/7/191/63

Mel Watt is the congressman she is counsel too. Lets call him and express our distaste for this women. Here is Mel's congressional contact info. You will either get a voicemail or a secretary. Either way be polite and tell them that Stephanie Moore is fundamentally wrong and should not be working for anyone representing people in a free society.

EDIT: She also has been sponsored by Rep John Conyers to attend various meetings and events. Here is his contact information as well as a link to the site that lists these trips she has taken which includes a policy briefing by microsoft on Xbox 360.

Yes. He also sits in one of the most non-competitive, gerrymandered districts in the House. It used to be said that if you drove down the interstate with your car doors open, you'd kill all his constituants. Before a Federal Court got involved, his district stretched from Charlotte, to Greensboro, and then over to Durham: about 140 miles long, but only 300 feet across (the width of the interstate) for parts of that trip.

Today his district is less gerrymandered, but unfortunately I don't believe that the new redistricting in North Carolina has significantly affected his ability to be reelected.

Executive summaries, PowerPoint etc. have slowly made most leaders slow and ineffective at dealing with change. I worked in a company that was adamant to continue to produce a DSL modem/Wifi Router/In-Room movie service box as their next product that would be installed per room into a Dslam on site in hotels. When I tried to explain to them people are just going to download porn online, cat-5 and a few Wifi routers are 1/10th the price and a Dlam is a pain in the troubleshoot over the phone they just ignored me. Why? Well they said they had been with the company for far longer, seniority was their excuse to drive a company into the ground. They never gave me one technical or analytical reason why their monstrosity of a project was actually worth pursuing, the actually thought they knew more about technology than their engineers, technicians and tech support because they had been sitting in rooms listening about technology at maybe a 10th grade level for 30 years.

Every one of them had business degrees, even the CTO but that is not too bad on its own. It was the fact that they had never ventured out of their academic discipline. Their book shelves, if they had any, were filled with popular management books, self-help guides and dieting books. Oh man, sorry for the long rant, I hated that place.

TL;DR: Management in MBA-led technical companies after a certain amount of time imho just becomes a bunch of deluded, self-righteous good old boys that will drive your company like 60 year old drunk frat boys at the wheel of a school bus.

A third of the folks I deal with are like "Hey, it's fine, we've been doing it this way for 30 years!" and a third are like "Hey, they just can't handle change. This is a brand new way to do it based on a seminar I went to."

And the rest of us of the last third have to mitigate the ignorance of the rest. Unfortunately 2/3rds outweigh 1/3rd which is probably why the company has been in decline for several years now... Good times.

Just cause they read it doesn't mean they were paying attention to what they are reading. All the bills neaded were important key words such as "freedom" and "protect children" and it sounds good because the actual bad part of the bill contains "technical mumbo jumbo" they don't understand so they just skim it over without really knowing what they are reading.

A simpler solution is to enforce a page limit (with set font size, page size, etc). Could also help eliminate pork, and make bills much more easily read and understood by the public. No huge power grabs hiding among thousands of pages of goobledygook.

I was at a debate last week for the leading candidates looking to fill the seat for my congressional district.
The question came up, "If a bill came to a vote, but was not released with enough time to allow you read it, would you abstain, protest, or vote the party line?"

Most said Abstain or Protest, none said they'd vote the party line.

The guy currently leading the polls, a moderately liberal democrat, insisted that he would read it.

"If you're experienced in politics, like me, you know how to read a bill."

Even when prompted, he adamantly refused to acknowledge it was possible to receive a 400+ page bill an hour before the vote, and not be able to read through it in time.

We haven't had a real fight for campaign finance reform in 100 years. We may never be able to legislate it away, but we can make it more difficult.

We will NEVER have proportional representation until we have campaign finance reform. Corporations would never allow this to happen. EVER. It's like SOPA/SIPA, I dunno why Redditors think that is the battle, even we "win" these bills/laws are gonna keep on coming. UNTIL campaign finance reform tells corporations they have no business making or influencing policy.

Again of course you will hear defeatists but if we want to win something, that is what we should win. It would be a windfall for at the very least 90% of Redditors woes, it is the very thing that perpetuates things like: Monsanto, Big Oil, Industrial War Complex, Industrial Prison Complex, War on Drugs, Big Pharma, Copyright, SOPA, SIPA on and on.

Also, revoke the corporate charters of large companies acting outside the interests of the public. It's been done before, by Teddy Roosevelt no less. Trust-busting is necessary to ensure that capitalism works properly, otherwise you end up with oligarchies that mess the system up and exploit the public.

When I vote, I choose between 97% terrible, and 95% terrible. There is no winning vote. If everyone in the U.S. turned out to vote, nothing would change, because all of the candidates are equally corrupt, with VERY few exceptions.

Not to be contrary here - but this woman isn't a politician, and she's is a perfect example of why many politicians make these kind of mistakes. We can't possibly expect every elected official to know everything about every bill - we can't even really expect them to know a LITTLE about MOST bills. There's just too much stuff. So, they have staff - smart staff - people who are supposed to be either experts on subjects, or have access to strong expertise they can reliably call upon for information. Then, they wrap all that up and give it to the politicians. When this system works - its fantastic. When it doesn't... and you have staff like this... our shit is fucked.

As finebydesign says - campaign finance reform. It'll give politicians more time to review legislation, more freedom from outside interests, and staff that isn't beholden to those interests.

edit: spellign
edit2: I should clarify - because many people have made the astute point that politicians should be reading and understanding bills they sign, because that is their job. I agree with this - but the difference between reading and understanding - as we all know - is vastly different. The far reaching implications of legislation often go well beyond what any reasonable, intelligent person could possibly understand or predict, so expert staff, consultants, advisers, etc. are completely necessary to help frame and shape decisions. Often, politicians are faced with a wide range of opinions from these advisers, and the real hard part (what we elect them to do) is to make a decision on what they think might be best. Therefore, in order to guide their decision-making, we need well-informed advisers. Hopefully that clears up my point a bit.

You can be damn sure politicians read bills in the 1700s and 1800s. In addition to being more eloquently written, they were far shorter. We're talking one to a few pages, rather than the forty-page monstrosities that go through nowadays, unread. (SOPA made it pretty clear that monied interests write the bills and just hand them to the sponsors.)

without giving away too much personal information I can say that I've worked for congressmen who do read at least the main articles of every bill - what they can't keep up with (even staffers barely can) are the amendments.

requiring all amendments to be read on the floor and be relevant to the main article of the bill would be a huge improvement just by itself.

"That entire sentence is so incredibly insulting. Millions of people spoke out against bad legislation. The public spoke out, and Moore is so against the basic concept of democracy that she has to claim that millions of people expressing their political opinion is "poisoning the well."

Yeah when did that become a word? I've never heard that before. Seems like a convenient new term to separate active internet users from people who aren't on it regularly. Demonize us. We're not people apparently.

I wish petitions actually mattered, and not in the sarcastic way, in the, "I seriously wish we had a way to get rid of these people that didn't involve thousands of dollars and moving to another country."

I used to think that the practice of killing off the old guard after the revolution was barbaric. But the realization is slowly dawning that these people will be like sand in the gears of change until they are cleaned out and gotten rid of. Perhaps we can ship them all off to Mars.

I had totally blocked out how naive people of the 90's were about the Internet. Remember spelling out every URL on the news or telling you the "AOL keyword"?

Also, netiquette? People seriously expected etiquette in a frontier scenario? Besides "no hotlinking"? Way off the mark on that one.

And then the general public got online. Then they still failed to "get it". And finally they just flocked to social media because they had no idea how to use a discussion forum to find and discuss relevant interests.

The netiquette thing was similar to people talking about Reddiquette here. If you put yourself in the context of the time, it makes sense (even more for me--I was there right at the transition).

The only people really online at the time were folks in Universities and various research facilities. Excepting for the occasional erudite flame war, this was a community who was used to communicating with each other in a very particular fashion. When outside folks starting coming online (even before the onslaught of the AOL me-too'ers), this whole notion of netiquette started going around as a way to basically tell the new people that they were amongst civilized, intelligent people and they should avoid acting like base, ignorant tools.

In hindsight, the whole thing seems foolish and even a cliche (established community is disrupted by fresh folk, older folk try to assert their community culture and fail, then complain and eventually move on), but this was the first time that the online community experienced this situation and they actually thought the new folks coming on board were the same type of people as them and would totally grok the whole netiquette thing. Obviously, that wasn't the case, and as you can see here with people going on about "Reddiquette," optimism still seems to triumph over experience.

The "hotlinking" thing was from the Web era when the masses had already started coming online. By then, the whole notion of netiquette had died out due to the arrival of the AOL me-too'ers.

Sure. But I feel like the fact that there even needs to be a term like this at shows that she clearly sees us as separate. As not the norm. And its silly generalized terms like this that an ignorant pitchfork mob can get behind. That's my biggest concern with it being used.

All you fellow Europeans please remember, when voting time comes around, to publicly register your protest against Barrosso, and his cronies in the EU commission. He's a US Gov/MAFIAA shill (like Harper in Canada), and was the scumbag who tried to hide ACTA on the back of a fisheries bill, in case the public got wind of it. (which they did)

Pondslime like Moore aren't on their own, and that MPAA and RIAA extortion and blackmail fund is being used in our neck of the woods as well.

I'm proud to be a Netizen (translate this as Global citizen outside of national borders in my context), and willing to continue to fight on behalf of fellow Netizens, as a global community, in the effort to crush the corruption that's destroying our planet, and our opportunity to evolve further as a species.

This is not about borders anymore, it's a genuine fight to get some balance back in not only governance systems, but remove those who would seek ultimate power over us all by whatever means they decide to employ.

Shit like this, and the MPAA's current copyright debacle, both stem from the inability of some people to understand the limitations and opportunities of new technology. It may be hard now, but someday people will look back in history books and mock people like this for their ignorance.

If I were to run into a hospital and start cutting people open or administering drugs, I'd be labeled a crazy person. I'm not a medical professional. Likewise, why are politicians allowed to propose/support bills affecting topics they are completely ignorant about?

So, as you can see, politics = the governance of a state = maintain, build, change the policy, actions and affairs that occur within that state. So, politics is effectively how we decide who gets to do what, where, when and why. In our current political system, any citizen is allowed to become a politician (with some age restrictions depending on the role). So, in an elective democracy, generally people are elected to represent an area if they know the interests and needs of that area. Thus, you get Chuck Grassley who knows about corn (Iowa I believe?) but has to POLITIC on every subject that comes up in the Senate, including climate change. Does he really understand/know about the quantitative science associated with climate change? No, not really. But then again, Scott Brown and John Kerry probably know very little about the biotech/life sciences industry that is burgeoning in their state, yet they must support that effort.

FYI. A better term is "doublethink". The entirety of Reddit, it seems, misunderstands what cognitive dissonance is. It is, "...a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously."1. So cognitive dissonance would be a by product of doublethink. Sorry to be so pedantic, but it is annoying.

Libertarian here, sadly the Republicans were only against SOPA because it was political ammo against the current administration. Party of individual liberty my ass, all they do is replace corrupt big government with corrupt big business.

The reason why this is fundamentally wrong is the foolish assumption that the Internet is American. It is not. The server hosting for a majority of websites may be in America, most website owners tend to be American, but the Internet is not part of America. It is it's own thing, a beautiful thing, and one that should never be limited by idiotic censorship laws. No single country, no matter how powerful they may be, no matter how much of a foothold they may have in media, or even in the Internet itself should ever have the tenacity to say they have control over it. I do not need to say how disgusting that act was, but it was all about power. They see an immense capacity to manipulate something that is not theirs to control us. The Internet is ours, the users, the content creators, the people who watch the YouTube videos of nutshots, the people who see adorable pictures of cats; not some old aged narrow minded fat cats who see this as the gold mine of advertising and content control. They want to control us and we will not let them. They underestimate us, they have only scraped the surface of our home, and there are darker places which they will regret they have ever faced.

TL;DR: fuck sopa, fuck all acts attempting to touch the Internet and especially fuck those who think they have some sort of right to do so.

If it's so shady that you cant tell us the reason you're really doing it, we don't want you doing it.

Just once I'd like to see, "Ok team, country A is doing this and here is the proof. We are concerned that it will result in X, Y, Z. To protect against it, we want to do this, it will result in this, you will be affected like this, while we are working on this we will add some things to make your lives better, and no other unrelated things are being attached to it and the only budget changes are for this specific program which we need for the aforementioned reasons. To pay for it we are temporarily getting funds from this same genre project as its not as short term important"

If the people who use the internet dont want the law, doesnt that mean we shouldnt have it? We live in a supposed democracy. The people with a vested interest claiming something will irreversibly harm the inherent foundation of a system, shouldnt that be taken seriously instead of being written off as "poisoning the well"?

To me, these types of comments are indicative of how Washington really only talks and gets opinions from itself, and those who can pay for access. It's easy to become convinced that you are right and other people are evil when you only talk to people you agree with.

I live and work in DC, and I honestly fall victim to this too. Last week we got an email from a citizen's group asking to know, in writing, why our office was late on a statutory requirement (too few staff, old technology, and no money), my initial instinct was to tell them to go fuck themselves, I'm working as hard as I can here. But they are right to ask - and we have to answer them. We work for them.

I'm a Congressional Staffer, and I worked to help my boss understand the ramifications of the SOPA. As a result, he has voted against both SOPA and CISPA.

Most Congressional Members are generations away from understanding the ramifications of these Bills. You all need to call your reps and talk to their offices.

Here's the deal: the youth shut down the internet, but they didn't do the most important thing - Vote. I've seen the numbers across the board and the youth failed miserably to vote in the primaries. You can shut down the internet and create a scene, but if you dont exercise your simple right to vote, then you fail.

The higher up the Congressman, and the higher up the staffer, the more power they actually have. She can't, for example, sign bills into law. But she'd be the one actually reading SOPA, because the Congressman doesn't have time for it, and then giving the bullet point summary. Or she'd be taking all the calls from the lobbyists, setting up meetings with committee members, and responding to constituent emails. All without being elected or publicly vetted. Depending on the amount of power and facetime her boss gives her, she can be extremely influential over something like this.

As a individual that has worked as a congressional staffer I will tell you that you are very wrong.

Not only are staffers a integral part of the policy making process but they are the farthest thing from a overpaid secretary. Many senior staffers like Mrs. Moore are policy wonks with Masters/PHDs.

I mean, who do you think writes/re-writes legislation or drafts amendments? The staffers in conjunction with other influencing parties. Our elected representatives play a minimal role in the policy drafting/language process.

When there are hearings, who do you think conjures up the pertinent questions asked by our elected representatives? Staffers.

Who do you think records the minutes and sets schedules thus determining the value of time and information for our elected representatives? Staffers.

Staffers play a critical and influential role in Congress. That's why many leave to take multimillion dollar jobs as lobbyists. I mean, why work for $100,000 a year as a staffer, when you could do the same thing for Pfizer for $250,000?

Personally, I would bet ten to one she had a large role in the language of SOPA.

Few to no senior staffers have PHD's in computer science or the hard sciences of any kind. A policy wonk understands the subtleties of the concerns related to maintaining relationships between the representatives that they work for and the industries and individuals that get them re-elected. You can't regulate or partner with individuals or industries that you don't understand. You can't attract individuals to develop and maintain those partnerships unless you pay them well. What we need is for google and facebook and microsoft to use their army of lobbyists to shame this woman into consulting with them before she makes these kinds of Rovian backwards speak press releases.

So.. any Democrats planning to switch to the 'pagans' that aren't limiting choices and free enterprise out of principle? It would be nice to have some more free thinkers over here. I know there are a lot in here since no one else has linked 'Democrat' to 'Staffer' yet (much less to 'fucking cunt'.)